Who I Am

 Hello all, welcome to my brain.

I am a Chaos Engineer by profession, predicting future outcomes and relaying the information in Excel spreadsheets and Power Point decks. There is truly a vast amount of information to gather and a dizzying amount of numbers to crunch, but breaking down and analyzing the issues will help put things into perspective. Less chaos, more coordination.

My intention is to be clear on my predictions, by breaking them down into their individual components and going from there. However as they say in an old tv show, the future is not set. All I can tell you is that the predictions are made at a point in time. If a prediction is made far ahead, things may happen that steer future happenings right or left.

I am also a trained anthropologist, and have a degree to prove it. My studies have taken me far and wide. The professors did a good job cramming all that information into my brain, and I've made it all quite worse by continuing my studies through the decades.

Additionally, I'm also a Jack of All Trades when it comes to studying, and that has led me to look at cultures and civilizations all over the world. There are uniqueness's in each of them, and commonalities in all of them in some way or other, that can be observed. I believe that to study one culture without recognizing others limits the range of information to be had. 

My pinnacle period of study was actually before I decided to switch my degree to Anthropology. By some quirk of luck I found myself on an archaeological dig at an Iron Age hillfort in West Wales. I enjoyed it enough to switch my major from Journalism, which I had been studying at the University.

In hindsight, Journalism gave me the gift of asking the major questions: who, what, where, why, how, and when. It also taught me how to think for myself - for instance, how to be told it's raining and then take myself outside to check. Verify from at least two independent sources. And look at the field of information, don't hyperfocus on one small topic without looking at something for comparison.

This blog format has been selected in order to record and preserve thoughts about past, present, and future events in the world from an Anthropological perspective. To quote the Spanish philosopher George Santayana, who originally wrote in 1905, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it".

Some people learn by being shown, others learn by doing. But the third way to learn is to read about it. My hope is that we can compare past events to what's happening now, so we can perform a bit of 'predictive future history'. Why do a past-to-present comparison? My thought on this is, if I can convey my knowledge of what happened to different stages of civilizations in the past, I can relay that information so that others may apply the knowledge and act accordingly.

The mis-quote from Mark Twain - because he never actually said it - is "History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes". The trick is to see the unique nuances and react accordingly.

The way the world is going at the moment, this blog is something that people can use to dodge the darkness, or at least know how to move in the shade.

Am I afraid to post my thoughts out there? 

I admit I'm a bit nervous. 

We'll see what happens.